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WASHINGTON - California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a top member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she has no information to support White House claims that its secret wiretapping helped thwart a 2002 Los Angeles terrorist attack. President George W. Bush implied in a speech Thursday that information gleaned from the wiretaps helped foil an al-Qaida plot to crash a commercial jetliner into the US Bank Tower. But after a closed-door briefing, Feinstein said she'd heard nothing to indicate a wiretap played any part in foiling the plot. "I have no way of knowing whether it did or not," Feinstein said....

An executive at ScienceLogic, a company used to monitor the online networks of the FBI and the Department of Defense, among others, were missing Monday after a four-alarm fire destroyed his 16,000-square-foot Annapolis home. Don Pyle, the chief operating officer at the Reston-based technology provider, and his wife Sandy, couldn’t be located, authorities said Monday. It took 85 firefighters nearly three-and-a-half hours to get the blaze under control and firefighters had yet to set foot inside the building, uncertain about its integrity, Monday afternoon. Neighbors told The Washington Times the Pyles’ grandchildren may have been staying with them for the...

WASHINGTON — The trail that led American officials to blame North Korea for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break into the computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable targets on earth. Spurred by growing concern about North Korea’s maturing capabilities, the American spy agency drilled into the Chinese networks that connect North Korea to the outside world, picked through connections in Malaysia favored by North Korean hackers and penetrated directly into the North with the help of South Korea and other...

The NSA's mass surveillance is just the beginning. Documents from Edward Snowden show that the intelligence agency is arming America for future digital wars -- a struggle for control of the Internet that is already well underway. Normally, internship applicants need to have polished resumes, with volunteer work on social projects considered a plus. But at Politerain, the job posting calls for candidates with significantly different skill sets. We are, the ad says, "looking for interns who want to break things." Politerain is not a project associated with a conventional company. It is run by a US government intelligence...

WASHINGTON - A new book on the government's secret anti-terrorism operations describes how the CIA recruited an Iraqi-American anesthesiologist in 2002 to obtain information from her brother, who was a figure in Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the CIA's behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the nuclear program because — he said — it had been dead for a decade. New York Times reporter James Risen uses the anecdote to illustrate how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of...

Tomorrow's New York Times Book Review publishes Walter Isaacson's review of James Risen's book exposing the NSA surveillance program that was originally the subject of Risen's December 16 Times story (with Eric Lichtblau). Isaacson's review is "Spies and spymasters." Walter Isaacson is a smart and serious man, but there is a curious lack of definition in his description of the great question lying at the heart of Risen's book: "[H]ow far should we Americans be willing to go, in terms of permitting things like wiretapping and torture, to fight terrorism? Risen doesn't seem to think it's his role to probe...

New York Times reporter James Risen is facing prison if he doesn’t reveal sources that gave him highly classified information on U.S. intelligence in Iran. Gabriel Schoenfeld says no reporter is above the law.

Last night John rendered his "Verdict: The New York Times blew the story." The "story" was the testimony of five federal judges -- Magistrate Judge Allan Kornblum and four former FISA court judges -- on Senator Specter's proposed revision of the FISA statute. According to yesterday's New York Times story by Eric Lichtblau: In a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the secretive court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, several former judges who served on the panel...voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president's constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order. They...

Eric Lichtblau, one of two New York Times' reporters who broke today's story of a secret government monitoring of private banking records - which the Bush Administration sought to block - said the White House arguments to halt the story were not as strong as those that had kept a previous report on secret wiretapping out of the paper for a year. "They were similar in terms of the objections raised not to publish," Lichtblau told E&P today. "That the bad guys knew we were listening to them, but they don't know exactly how." But he said the objections "did...

Is The New York Times about to be indicted? That would be a fair inference from the strange exchanges that have gone back and forth over the past few days between the Justice Department and the editors of the paper. On Sunday, during the ABC news program, "This Week," Attorney General Gonzales was asked if the federal government might prosecute journalists who published classified information. "There are some statutes on the books," he answered, "which . . . would seem to indicate that this is a possibility." He went on to suggest that such prosecutions were implicitly authorized by the...

WASHINGTON – During the weeks before he was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, reporter Michael Hastings was researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida socialite Jill Kelley against the Department of Defense and the FBI. Hastings, 33, was scheduled to meet with a representative of Kelley next week in Los Angeles to discuss the case, according to a person close to Kelley. Hastings wrote for Rolling Stone and the website BuzzFeed. Kelley alleges that military officials and the FBI leaked her name to the media to discredit her after she reported receiving a stream...

If you want a truly anonymous life, then maybe it's time you learned about Tor, CSpace and ZRTP. These three technologies could help people hide their activities from the National Security Agency, according to NSA documents newly obtained from the archive of former contractor Edward Snowden by the German magazine Der Spiegel. The combination of Tor, CSpace and ZRTP (plus another anonymizing technology for good measure) results in levels of protection that the NSA deems "catastrophic" -- meaning the organization has "near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications," according to Der Spiegel. "Although the documents are around two years old,...

The U.N. General Assembly voted unanimously Monday to ask Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to appoint an independent panel of experts to examine new information about the mysterious plane crash that killed U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld on a peace mission to newly independent Congo in 1961. The 193-member world body approved a resolution by consensus encouraging member states to release any relevant records and information on his death in the plane crash over the African bush in Northern Rhodesia—today’s Zambia. The assembly’s action follows an independent investigation by a Commission of Jurists released in September 2013 which concluded that “significant new evidence”...

The National Security Agency may have violated U.S. law for over a decade with the unauthorized surveillance of U.S. citizens' overseas communications, according to new reports on the agency's intelligence collection practices released by the NSA on Wednesday. The U.S. spy agency released the highly confidential reports in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). According to documents posted on the NSA website on Christmas Eve, the examples of violations include sending data on Americans to unauthorized recipients, storing such data on unprotected computers and retaining them after they were meant...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio feared police officers were spying on his conversations during his election campaign last year, it has emerged. In an early sign of his tension with the force, de Blasio's team was 'convinced' that members of his police detail were listening in on his private conversations inside his city-assigned car, a former de Blasio aide has told Politico. De Blasio would even step into the street to make sure he was out of their earshot, the aide added. The mayor's office has not yet responded to a request for comment on the claims.

Oscar-winning actor Matt Damon says his love affair with President Barack Obama is finally over. "He broke up with me," the once ardent supporter and campaigner for Obama told the Black Entertainment Network (BET) in a recent interview. The A-list movie star and Democrat said there were "a lot of things" he questions about Obama's second term, specifically the legality of drone strikes and the NSA's secret surveillance programs.

Aaron Sorkin is disillusioned; he’s left to wonder if there is any "such thing as privacy anymore."Sorkin, famous Hollywood screenwriter who wrote The Social Network, Moneyball, and The West Wing, also wrote a New York Times editorial, sharing his views on the Sony hack of Hollywood emails: If you close your eyes you can imagine the hackers sitting in a room, combing through the documents to find the ones that will draw the most blood. And in a room next door are American journalists doing the same thing. As demented and criminal as it is, at least the hackers are...

Oh sure, they look cute and innocent.Butt look closer, they may be government agents:Or possibly even double agents. You simply can’t trust them.They may all be working for the NSA for all we know. WASHINGTON — Internal documents from the National Security Agency show that its intelligence-gathering reached far deeper into Santa Claus’s annual toy-distribution operations than acknowledged. Sources close to the agency had previously confirmed that it has been provided with the contents of Mr. Claus’s database of naughty and nice children under a confidential data-sharing arrangement. But according to the documents, which were among those leaked by Edward Snowden,...

Matt Drudge of the influential Drudge Report news aggregation site expressed discontent over a federal spending bill that passed with votes from both Republicans and Democrats in the House. The $1.1 trillion spending bill that runs through September 2015 is now up for a vote in the Democratically-led Senate. Many conservatives, including Drudge, are upset that the bill funds both Obamacare and President Obama's immigration executive orders. "Obama got EVERYTHING," Drudge tweeted Friday. "NSA dirt on Boehner must be incredible. Chicago wins."

Congress this week quietly passed a bill that may give unprecedented legal authority to the government's warrantless surveillance powers, despite a last-minute effort by Rep. Justin Amash to kill the bill. Amash staged an aggressive eleventh-hour rally Wednesday night to block passage of the Intelligence Authorization Act, which will fund intelligence agencies for the next fiscal year. The Michigan Republican sounded alarms over recently amended language in the package that he said will for the first time give congressional backing to a controversial Reagan-era decree granting broad surveillance authority to the president.